Another crypto-currency is born

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21709329-another-crypto-currency-born-known-unknown

by doener • 10 years ago

63 28 10 years ago

bachback3• 10 years ago

Great job - the currency is down 97-99% since launch 2 weeks ago (depending on what prices one takes from the first day of public trading). I've been following Altcoin launches since 2013, and this was the most ill-advised and corrupted so far.

ewillbefull5• 10 years ago

That's not the full picture.

Zcash has a "mining slow start" which slowly ramps up the mining reward for the first two weeks, to reduce the threat that a large amount of the ultimate monetary base would be in control of early-advantage miners. As a result of the significantly reduced supply, the price was very high shortly after launch.

bachback3• 10 years ago

Oh, it is a great work of art, this financial engineering. Anyone who has put in money is down 90% already and will never see that price again. I'm not surprised at all - Cryptographers without knowledge (pun intended) of economics shouldn't be designing these systems. Zooko and everyone involved made a great fool of himself.

solotronics• 10 years ago

I think additionally it would be good to compare the price*volume to get an idea of whats happening. If only a few trades were made at $5k...

badloginagain• 10 years ago

Can't say that I like the idea of a kingly reserve to "align interests". Honestly the biggest pull I would have to invest is because I feel I missed the boat with Bitcoin and would feel smart being getting in on the ground floor.

mabbo• 10 years ago

Another cryptocurrency? Is it Tuesday already?

bachback3• 10 years ago

Launches are happening everyday. Best performing Altcoin is Ethereum. It went to 1,000,000,000$ this year very quickly. On average investing in Altcoins will likely lose money.

dgacmu• 10 years ago

In fairness, this one is actually interesting, in the way that Monero and Ethereum (and perhaps Ripple and Stellar) were also interesting, and 99% of the other alt-coins are not. That doesn't mean it's a good idea or will be successful or profitable, but it's at least interesting.

joecool1029• 10 years ago

Another business avenue The Economist might consider pursuing includes the promotion of new penny stocks!

I looked but seem to have missed the disclaimer for this paid advertising. A curious omission of its author too?

JumpCrisscross• 10 years ago

The Economist doesn't do bylines:

"The first few issues of The Economist were...written almost entirely by James Wilson, the founding editor, though he wrote in the first-person plural.

...

Having started off as a way for one person to give the impression of being many, anonymity has since come to serve the opposite function at The Economist: it allows many writers to speak with a collective voice."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...

curiousgal• 10 years ago

Re Title Anyone can make a crypto-currency, adoption is what matters.

Animats3• 10 years ago

(Article date: Oct 29th 2016). This is so last week. Zcash has already crashed. Peaked around $5000, today $127. Not only that, the anonymity feature didn't work. You can't send to "z addresses" only. This is claimed by the developers to be a bug they will fix. Since that was the main feature of this altcoin, and they shipped with it broken, they're either incompetent or disabled it to avoid regulatory problems.

Roger Ver, a convicted felon who claimed Mt. Gox was sound[1], is involved with ZCash. What could possibly go wrong?

ZCash is from Tel Aviv, headquarters of "binary option" scams. The entire Tel Aviv based binary options business has been exposed as a scam. [2] (Short version: a binary option is a bet against the house, not other investors, and the house cheats. Online binary option companies claimed to be in lots of places, including Trump Tower, but they're almost always really in Tel Aviv.) People in the "binary option" industry are now looking for new scams. "Forex" is one. There's a lot of interest in "blockchains" there.[3] This is a worry.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP1YsMlrfF0 [2] http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-... [3] http://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-and-blockchain-startups...

ewillbefull5• 10 years ago

There's a lot of absurdity in your comment, but I wanted to reply to one thing:

Not only that, the anonymity feature didn't work. You can't send to "z addresses" only.

This is untrue, there was a bug that _delayed_ mining of some transactions to z addresses, but not all of them, and it was fixed last week.

Animats3• 10 years ago

It's not wrong. (The poster above has previously disclosed a connection with ZCash.)

- ZCash unable to send to Z-addresses without a send to a non-anonymous address.[1] Fixed in v1.0.2, released last week.

- Some randomization features removed temporarily.[2] Not clear how much anonymity this costs, but some developers are concerned.

[1] https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/zcash-bug-prevents-private-t...

[2] https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/1819

exstudent2• 10 years ago

Zcash prices were insanely high on day one because demand was high and there was practically no supply. Everyone knew that was going to happen and the price is now normalizing.

There is a bug with mining to zaddresses but Zcash developers have been extremely transparent about it and were the first to say that this crypto is untested and will be iterated.

As for Tel Aviv... it doesn't matter where technology is developed, does it? Your comment strikes me as xenophobic muck raking.

ZCash has unique properties. You're free to not buy it and honestly the negative speculation helps those of us that are interested in using it as it keeps prices down (for now).

micimize• 10 years ago

This article neglects to mention Monero or Dash, the preexisting altcoins designed to be have anonymous transactions, or any existing shuffling tools like dark wallet.

I'm not an expert by any means, but this seems like a good compare/contrast that elucidates zcash's actual place in the space: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/41vg68/monero_vs_zc...

ewillbefull5• 10 years ago

Disclosure: I am an engineer working on Zcash.

Anonymity is not a binary. Monero, even with the addition of RingCT, is vulnerable to transaction graph analysis (intersection attacks) that can de-anonymize users. Zcash takes a completely different approach that achieves ledger indistinguishability -- shielded transactions in the blockchain have no apparent relationship with each other, which is an essential privacy benefit.

Much of what I read in that thread is wrong or misleading: Monero does not have a trusted setup, but it's important to note that a failure in Zcash's setup does not disrupt the privacy of the system. The "poison-pill" vulnerability is not a concern in our system. The claims about the anonymity set are very misleading. It is possible to do far more than multi-sig in our system, we just haven't implemented it yet. The point about mining is specific to the paper and is irrelevant.

There are downsides to the system, such as our performance problems, but they are solveable given time. Zcash is obviously not the only player, but it's also going to continue to grow and adapt and improve, just like other cryptocurrencies will.

grapevines• 10 years ago

Monero, even with the addition of RingCT, is vulnerable to transaction graph analysis (intersection attacks) that can de-anonymize users.

Your comment is highly misleading. RingCT solves 4 of the 5 remaining, known, privacy vulnerabilities in Monero ## The last remaining vulnerability has to do with transactions made with very little turnover, i.e. an amount is received and then immediately spent again. The privacy is stronger as the amounts are held in the wallet for longer.

Monero is useable on a magnitude greater scale in 2017, and a full node can be run with small CPU and memory. Zcash on the other hand requires minutes to send anonymouse transactions.

In other words, Zcash provides 100% privacy at the expense of scalability while Monero provides privacy approaching 100 percent as variable with time.

## http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/1495/what-privacy-...

jb613• 10 years ago

Given free market indicators such as Bitcoin marketcap and the recent rise of Monero vs zcash - perhaps absolute privacy is not what the market values?

MrQuincle• 10 years ago

Ethereum is Turing complete. Did anyone attempt to recursively define a blockchain within it? :-)

That would be the same as the Ubercoin they mention I suppose.

duckingtest• 10 years ago

Their slow-mining start was, I think, a very bad idea. I get that they wanted a more fair distribution and to prevent an initial bubble. However, bubbles and rich early adopters result in organic viral marketing and create a network effect. Given zcash's hype, with a faster coin issuance they had the potential to beat ethereum in marketcap.

I really hope they succeed, anonymous currency is badly needed.

Another crypto-currency is born

Related Stories